"Sham" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her studies, why, she did not know. But the whole thing seemed sham, spurious; spurious Gothic arches, spurious peace, spurious Latinity, spurious dignity of France, spurious naivete of Chaucer. It was a second-hand dealer's shop, and one bought an equipment for an examination. This was only a little side-show to the factories of the town. Gradually ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... cruel business. A sham second was imposed on poor little Fresh. Brave as Julius Caesar, he sat up all night writing letters and preparing his will. Prompt to the moment, he was on the chosen ground. An unusually large delegation for such a delicate affair seemed to be present. One rascal who wore enormous ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... them, or else a splendid mass of foliage stood out before it like an oriflamme. I could make out, as on a coloured map, Armenonville, the Pre Catalan, Madrid, the Race Course and the shore of the lake. Here and there would appear some meaningless erection, a sham grotto, a mill, for which the trees made room by drawing away from it, or which was borne upon the soft green platform of a grassy lawn. I could feel that the Bois was not really a wood, that it existed for a purpose alien to the life of its trees; my sense of exaltation ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Mr. Holway and everything else—the whole of it. Haven't you guessed it yet? It was all a sham; don't you see? When I came back from college and found out exactly how things were going, I realized at once that something must be done. You were miserable and neglected, and Mother was under the influence of Mrs. Black and that empty-headed, ridiculous Chapter and ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of these Divine Things; lose the sense that perceives them, their essential universality, their inevitable universality;—and where are you? What are you to do about the inner life?—Why, for lack of reality, you shall take a sham: you shall hatch up some formula of words; or better still, take the formula already hatched that comes handiest; call it your creed or confession of faith; fix your belief on that, as supreme and infallible, ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... honor and conscience there is great truth in what you say. I could name you a magistrate who, I believe, as a magistrate, could not very aisily be bate, and yet who, without being a downright coward, is for all that no hairo to his valley de sham, as they say." ...
— The Tithe-Proctor - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... Irving, and differs, in degree at least, from the comic almanac exaggeration and coarseness which preceded it, puts its foot on every bud of sentiment, holds few things sacred, and refuses to regard anything in life seriously. But it has no mercy for any sham. ...
— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner
... the world's greatest sham of a nation, the 'English cousin,' the Judas among the nations, who betrays Germanism for thirty pieces of silver. Against us stands sensual France, the harlot amongst the peoples. Against us stands Russia, inwardly rotten, mouldering, masking its ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy
... contrary; for that there were many crimes for which shame was inflicted by the English laws, and that it was indeed one consequence of all punishment. "Dat be ver strange," said the king; "for me know and hears good deal of your people, dough me no live among dem; and me have often hear dat sham is de consequence and de cause too of many of your rewards. Are your rewards and punishments den de ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... pretence that they were intended for the imperial government of China. Finally, on the 10th of June, casting all promises and pretexts to the winds, the French troops had marched into the capital of Mexico, made themselves masters of the country, vamped up a sham throne, and upon it set an Austrian puppet. That Napoleon III. nursed among his favorite dreams the vision of a Latin empire in America, built upon the ruins of Mexican liberty and taking in at least the fairest ...
— History of the Nineteenth Army Corps • Richard Biddle Irwin
... not a step in his business with these sham Ministers, and yet imagined that he got daily ground. I made no progress with the true ones, but I saw it. These, however, were not our only difficulties. We lay under another, which came from your side, and which embarrassed us more. The first hindered ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... pointed the other way. In the first place the Pawnees were quite certain to perceive the sham, and, in case they were deceived, they were likely to tomahawk Otto so as to end the annoyance. These two considerations kept him plodding along with the party, which, ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... Fred Badger, and listening to what he had to say from time to time. Apparently Fred was as indignant as any of them, and so far as Jack could tell there was not a particle of sham about his fervent denunciation of the evil deed contemplated by those strangers anxious to beat the Chester people, who wagered with them, out ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... just now you have not done as you agreed. You are not the learned scientist you represented yourself to be — instead, if we are to believe our newly made friends here, you are a pretender, a big sham, and a brute in the bargain. This being so, we intend to dispense with your services from this day forth. We will pay you what is coming to you, give you your share of our outfit, and then you can go your way and we will go ours. We absolutely ...
— The Rover Boys in the Jungle • Arthur M. Winfield
... turned to mud by the tears of the ghost of the Rev. Charles Honeyman, and by my own tears.... I have strayed again into sentiment. Back to the point—which is that the new houses and streets in Mayfair mean nothing. Let me show you Mount Street. Let me show you that airy stretch of sham antiquity, and defy you to say that it symbolises, how remotely soever, the spirit of its time. Mount Street is typical of the new Mayfair. And the new Mayfair is typical of the new London. In the height of these new houses, in the width of these new roads, future students will find, doubtless, ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... or obstruct a Regular Detection of that Witchcraft, is what we may well with an holy fear avoid. Their Majesties good Subjects must not every day be torn to pieces by horrid Witches, and those bloody Felons, be left wholly unprosecuted. The Witchcraft is a business that will not be sham'd, without plunging us into sore Plagues, and of long continuance. But then we are to unite in such Methods for this deliverance, as may be unquestionably safe, lest the latter end be worse than the beginning. And here, what shall I say? I will venture to say thus much, ...
— The Wonders of the Invisible World • Cotton Mather
... Cobham, Sir Griffin Markham and his brothers, the Puritan Lord Grey of Wilton, and Sir Edward Parham were variously and confusedly implicated. The intrigue, 'a dark kind of treason,' as Rushworth calls it, 'a sham plot' as it is styled by Sir John Hawles, belongs to our story only so far as the cross machinations involved Ralegh. His slender relation to it is as hard to fix as a cobweb or a nightmare. Even in his own age his part in it was, as obsolete ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... neglect was his great distress for money. He had learnt to have recourse to his father's disgraceful plea of a sham Crusade, and thus, for six years, gained a tenth of the Church revenues; but in 1294, requiring a further supply, he made a demand of half the year's income of the clergy. The new Archbishop, Robert Winchelsea, was gone to Rome to receive his pall; the Dean of St. Paul's, who ...
— Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... no shouting among them, no patriotic demonstrations, no excitability. They stood waiting for their trains in a quiet, patient way, chatting among themselves, smiling, smoking cigarettes, like soldiers on their way to sham fights in the ordinary summer manoeuvres. The town and village folk, who crowded about them and leaned over the gates at the level crossings to watch our train, were more demonstrative. They waved hands to us and cried out "Bonne ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... write precisely what you think, no more, no less. You are going right away from this howling cockpit, and never need set foot in it again. You are going to a beautiful climate, a free life in the open, with no vestige of sham or pretence about it, and long, secure leisure to reflect, to think, to muse, to read, to do precisely what you desire to do, and nothing else. You are free—free! Do you hear, you tired hack? Too tired to prick your ears, eh? Ah, well, wait till you've been a ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... feudal estate of La Bastie in the Comtat from the claws of the Revolution. Like all timid folk of that day, the Comte de La Bastie, now citizen Mignon, found it more wholesome to cut off other people's heads than to let his own be cut off. The sham terrorist disappeared after the 9th Thermidor, and was then inscribed on the list of emigres. The estate of La Bastie was sold; the towers and bastions of the old castle were pulled down, and citizen Mignon was soon after discovered at Orleans and put to death with ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... performed, was the offering of a sham kangaroo, made of grass, to the fifteen lads, who were still seated as before. One man brought the kangaroo, and a second carried some brushwood, besides having one or two flowering shrubs stuck ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... nothing all night. The ragged Italian in front of the fresco in his village church or at the back of the gallery at the opera of his town knows more essentials of painting and music than any of us. It's a hollow sham of a world filled with ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... :shambolic link: /sham-bol'ik link/ /n./ A Unix symbolic link, particularly when it confuses you, points to nothing at all, or results in your ending up in some completely unexpected part of ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... held offices of state either had done, or were waiting their turn to do, much the same as the present defendant; and every effort had been made by his friends either to put off the trial indefinitely, or to turn it into a sham by procuring the appointment of a private friend and creature of his own as public prosecutor. On the other hand, the Sicilian families, whom he had wronged and outraged, had their share of influence also at Rome, and there was a growing impatience of the insolence ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... he was right, and retreated as fast as we could, but still backward, mine being the duty to keep the mouth of our sham cannon to bear upon them as well as the blundering backward through the mudholes of the dirty street ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... we,' said Theodormon; 'it is quite a recent eruption due to the Celtic movement. The rock you see, however, is not a real rock, but a sham rock. Mr. George Moore has been turned out of the cave, and is still ...
— Masques & Phases • Robert Ross
... one hand—you can see for yourself in any unfashionable part of Great Britain—are people badly, uncomfortably, painfully shod in old boots, rotten boots, sham boots; and on the other great stretches of land in the world, with unlimited possibilities of cattle and leather and great numbers of people who, either through wealth or trade disorder, are doing no work. And our question is: 'Why cannot the latter set to work ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... and as they entered it first she recalled with still unaccustomed laughter his reply to the proffered services of the guide. Indeed, there was much laughter in their excursions: his native humour sprang from the same well that held his seriousness. She was amazed at his ability to strip a sham and leave it grotesquely naked; shams the risible aspect of which she had never observed in spite of the familiarity four years had given her. Some of his own countrymen and countrywomen afforded him the greatest amusement in their efforts to carry off acquired European ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... see it will only be a sham duel so far as we are concerned, but will, in the most harmless fashion possible, prove you to be a man of honor and courage. Major Sampson's scruples will vanish, and you will have the pleasure of gaining his daughter's hand ...
— Joe The Hotel Boy • Horatio Alger Jr.
... nation? Alas! it is the narrowness, selfishness, minuteness, of your sensation that you have to deplore in England at this day;—sensation which spends itself in bouquets and speeches: in revellings and junketings; in sham fights and gay puppet shows, while you can look on and see noble nations murdered, man by man, without an effort or ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... which overleaps itself, since a classic temple in the heart of Liebenstein is surely as much out of place as a tiara would be on the head of the peasant woman who hands you your daily portion of Stahlwasser. Even the spring it originally sheltered has revolted against its sham marble pillars and grotesque entablature, and betaken itself elsewhere! Nowadays the paint and plaster are peeling off the columns, and its door is padlocked. Happily—although a melancholy warning to the educated—it ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson
... discussion. Both the Senate and House appointed compromise committees, which met and labored, but could find no common ground of agreement. A peace convention met and deliberated at Washington, with no practical result, except to waste the powder for a salute of one hundred guns over a sham report to which nobody paid ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... will have something to say about this insult to the flag. They will wipe out the disgrace by sweeping those scoundrels into the sea." The Colonel usually looked on the bright side of things. He recalled the trainings of other days, when his regiment paraded on the green and had a sham-fight. He wished that he were once more in command; he would march to Charleston, burn the city, and sow ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... 1780, in Mr. Langton's Collection. Hay was third in command in the expedition to North America in 1757. It was reported that he said that 'the nation's wealth was expended in making sham-fights and planting cabbages.' He was put under arrest and sent home to be tried. Gent. Mag. 1758, p. 170. Mr. Croker says that 'the real state of the case was that he had gone mad, and was in that state sent home.' He died before the sentence of the ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... up stairs that night, in spite of the cautions given by the usher to be quiet, a sham scuffle ensued on purpose between Salisbury and Frank Digby, during which the former let his candle fall over the bannisters, and they were left in darkness; though, happily for the comfort of the doctor's dinner party, the second hall and back staircase arrangement ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... removed for no reason which can be adequately explained, except that on the occasion of a royal marriage it was thought necessary to destroy what was contrived in the maniera tedesca, substituting a sham painted affair which was speedily ruined by the elements. The ethics of vandalism are indeed strange and varied. In this case vanity was responsible. It was superstition which led the Sienese, after incurring defeat by the Florentines, to remove from their market-place the famous statue by Lysippus ...
— Donatello • David Lindsay, Earl of Crawford
... act, whilst the rest thus appointed:—Dividing his troops into three columns, Sir Edward directed that General Keane, at the head of the 95th, the light companies of the 21st, 4th, and 44th, together with the two black corps, should make a demonstration, or sham attack, upon the right; that General Gibbs, with the 4th, 21st, 44th, and 93rd, should force the enemy's left, whilst General Lambert, with the 7th and 43rd, remained in reserve, ready to act as circumstances might require. ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... the street door knocks. When the housemaid knocked, into bed I got; an hour afterwards home came my mother and into my bed-room. She approved of the hot foot-bath, but insisted on my taking a febrifuge. To keep up the sham, I took it, Mary brought it and stood by, whilst my mother gave it to me; my prick was again standing like a prop at the sight of Mary, and as my mother pulled the bed-clothes over me, she might, if she had had eyes, seen my ...
— My Secret Life, Volumes I. to III. - 1888 Edition • Anonymous
... of the people. He talked to the Rajput chiefs, and persuaded them—they were not difficult to persuade—that Dr. Roberts was an agent and a spy of the English Government at Calcutta, that his medicines were a sham. When it was necessary, Surji Rao said that the medicines were a slow form of poison, but generally he said they were a sham. He persuaded as many of the chiefs as dared, to remonstrate with the Maharajah, and to follow his example ...
— The Story of Sonny Sahib • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... one generation into another without losing much of what grace it had, and acquiring most odious and mischievous elements. Entailed Puritanism being an actual impossibility, all attempts to realize it, all assumptions of success in it, have the worst features of sham and hypocrisy. The diligent students of the history and the social life of our own colonial days know very well what an unspeakable difference there was, in all that makes and manifests characters and dispositions, between the first ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... through this dressing station some thousands of cases, and we may have had eight or ten malingerers. But this is not all sham. There is a strong mixture of hysteria and suggestion with the sham. A chap with a highly organised temperament gets buried by a shell. That is a terrific nerve shock. He sees two or three chaps blown to bits. Another nerve shock. Now he has heard about shell shock ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... the scene when the MS. had been shown to Darrell—his pretence of disapproval, his sham warnings, and the smile on his sallow face as he walked off with it. Ashe looked back to the early days of his friendship with Darrell, when he, Ashe, was one of the leaders at Eton, popular with the masters in spite of his incorrigible idleness, and popular with the boys ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I don't like to contradick you; it wouldn't be my place. But if these are real cocoanuts, them we buys—I mean I buys—at home are sham ones." ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... business had a sham bedstead in that room? The idea of it riled up something besides sympathy in my bosom. I had rather see bare walls than a bedstead like the one he died on. Why don't ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens
... strive. He was a crafty Eskimo, and a thought had occurred to him. He would sham exhaustion, and, when his foes relaxed their grip, would burst away from them. He knew it was a forlorn hope, for he was well aware that, even if he should succeed in getting away, the spouters would send messengers ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... marvellously the minor key of tender memory which relieves the brutality of that ruthless flagellation. Mr. Goldwin Smith's more numerous "Bay Leaves" are fashioned all in goodly measure; and his "Blest man who far from care and strife" well transfers to English the breathlessness of Horace's sham pastoral ecstasy. Of more ambitious translators Bulwer Lytton catches now and then the careless rapture of his original; Sir Theodore Martin is always musical and flowing, sometimes miraculously fortunate in his metres, but ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... necessity of laws at home, after depleting their salmon rivers, deer runs and seal floes to the danger point. And there is no reason to suppose that an excellent population in so many ways would be any harder to deal with in this one than the hordes of poachers and sham sportsmen ...
— Supplement to Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... image to appear at first as a real object. This psychological truth, though proven through observation, has made itself acceptable only with great difficulty. It has had to struggle on the one hand against the prejudices of common-sense for which imagination is synonymous with sham and vain appearance and opposed to the real as non-being to being; on the other hand, against a doctrine of the logicians who maintain that the idea is at first merely conceived with no affirmation of existence or non-existence (apprehensio simplex). ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... Among his sham titles are Dux Roani and 'de Roano,' clearly referring, as Mr. Steuart notices, to de la Cloche's travelling name of Henri de Rohan. The Neapolitan pretender, therefore, knew the secret of that incognito, and so of de la Cloche's mission to England in 1668. That, possessing ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... Said; Why V.A.D.'s can't replace Male Orderlies; What this Morning's Operations Looked Like; Whether an Officers' Ward or a Men's Ward is the nicer; Who Deserves Stripes; C.O.'s Parade and its Terrors; Advantages of Volunteering for Night Duty; The Cushy Job of being in charge of a Sham Lunacy Case; Other Cushy Jobs less cushy than They Sounded; and so forth; until at last protests began to be voiced by the wearier folk who ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... marred by political and social instability. Col. Joseph MOBUTU seized power and declared himself president in a November 1965 coup. He subsequently changed his name - to MOBUTU Sese Seko - as well as that of the country - to Zaire. MOBUTU retained his position for 32 years through several subsequent sham elections as well as through the use of brutal force. Ethnic strife and civil war, touched off by a massive inflow of refugees in 1994 from fighting in Rwanda and Burundi, led in May 1997 to the toppling of the MOBUTU regime ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... is a sham," responded the ex-courier in complete good humour. "I am an actor; and if I ever had a private character, I have forgotten it. I am no more a genuine brigand than I am a genuine courier. I am only a bundle of masks, and you can't fight a duel with that." And he laughed with boyish pleasure ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... prescription book every dose of medicine administered." Weston said he would never grudge a doctor's bill, however large; but he was anxious to prevent idleness under pretence of illness. "Nothing," said he, "is so subversive of discipline, or so unjust, as to allow people to sham, for this causes the well-disposed to do the work ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... said we must speak of God always as he is; we must in no case tell lies about God "whether they are allegories or whether they are not allegories." Plato, like every real thinker, sees that this pretence of allegory is a sham. The story did its mischief whether it was allegory or not; it stood between man and God, and headed men on to wrong lines, turned men away from ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... pound with a lot of other children, beaten if you talk, beaten if you move, beaten if you cannot prove by answering idiotic questions that even when you escaped from the pound and from the eye of your gaoler, you were still agonizing over his detestable sham books instead of daring to live. And your childish hatred of your gaoler and flogger is nothing to his adult hatred of you; for he is a slave forced to endure your society for his daily bread. You have not even the satisfaction of knowing how you are ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... voice, and when Gladys looked towards the platform behind the footlights, she was horrified at the spectacle of a large, coarse-looking woman, wearing the scantiest possible amount of clothing, her face painted and powdered, her hair adorned with gilt spangles, her arms and neck hung with sham jewellery. ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... so long ago," he replied, "and as the captain is asleep over there, and there was nobody to talk to, I thought I would go and try to find the back of his head"—pointing to the stone face above them. "But he hasn't any. He is a sham." ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... civilisation in Syria; then the shops along the Colonnade were filled with rich goods, the Forum listened to the voice of world-famous orators and teachers, and proud lords and ladies assembled in the Naumachia to watch the sham battles of the miniature galleys. A little later the new religion of Christianity found a foothold here, (see, these are the ruined outlines of a Christian church below us to the south, and the foundation of a great Basilica), and by the fifth century ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... California boys And open wide your ears, For now we start across the plains With a herd of mules and steers. Now, bear in mind before you start, That you'll eat jerked beef, not ham, And antelope steak, Oh cuss the stuff! It often proves a sham. ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... religious meeting; it was a meeting full of religion. And it was a picture that will ever stand fresh in my memory and which will be an inspiration in time of doubt. There was nothing there but the real things, absolutely no sham of any kind. Oh, it was wonderful! I hope you can get just a little idea of what it was. I wish you would keep this letter. I want to be able to read it in ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... Wabash and Illinois Indians to keep the peace. Later, Benjamin Lincoln, Timothy Pickering, and Beverly Randolph were ordered by the president to go to the Maumee to conclude a general treaty which Indians had declared their willingness to enter into. But the commissioners were detained at Niagara by sham conferences with Gov. John Graves Simcoe, of Canada, until the middle of July, when the Indians sent them word that unless they would in advance "agree that the Ohio shall remain the boundary between us," the proposed "meeting ...
— Chronicles of Border Warfare • Alexander Scott Withers
... was inspired by anyone it was by Voltaire. His drama is the old drama of the eighteenth century, repainted in picturesque colours; it resembles those grotesque country-houses that our forefathers were so fond of, where the sham-Gothic turrets and castellations ill conceal the stucco and the pilasters of a former age. Of true character and true passion it has no trace. The action, the incidents, the persons—all alike are dominated by considerations ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... progress of our conversation Mr. Gerard suggested that the realisation of far-reaching aspirations in Belgium would give King Albert merely a sham authority and asked whether it would not be better for Germany to forego such plans and instead of them endeavour to acquire Liege which Mr. Gerard thought ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... am only a plain country squire. Of course I should call such dealing with an Act of Parliament a lie and a sham-But about these things, I fancy, the women know best. Jane is ten thousand times as good as I am-you don't know half her worth-And I haven't the heart to contradict her-nor the right either; for I have no reasons to give her; no ...
— Phaethon • Charles Kingsley
... at least there were any grounds for them, it would be something to get hold of, to cling to. Now there are only shadows that hide themselves in the bushes, and stick out their heads and grin; it is like fighting with the air, or firing blank cartridges in a sham fight. A fatal reality would have called forth resistance, stirred life and soul to action; but now my thoughts dissolve into air, and my brain grinds a void until it is on fire.—Put a pillow under my head, and throw something over me, I am ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... as of coming storm in Wall Street for several weeks, and this had culminated in a small, and probably a sham, tempest, with more stage thunder and lightning than any real. However, it was on that very account just the sort of cataclysm to overwhelm phantom and illusory ships of fortune like Arthur Carrolls. That week ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Castine no longer had any particular claims to friendship. The last time he had heard Vanne's whistle was a night five years before, when they both joined a gang of river-drivers, and made a raid on some sham American speculators and surveyors and labourers, who were exploiting an oil-well on the property of the old seigneur. The two had come out of the melee with bruised heads, and Vanne with a bullet in his calf. But soon afterwards came ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... accustomed to govern and likes to discourse; and his outline had the very form of bidding. He expressed himself admirably in our language, of which he knew the intimate graduations. I heard him saying, "These great maneuvers, after all, they're a sham. It's music-hall war, directed by scene-shifters. Hunting's better, because there's blood. We get too much unaccustomed to blood, in our prosaic, humanitarian, and bleating age. Ah, as long as the nations love hunting, I shall not ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... a rollicking Ram, Attired in an old pillow sham. When asked if he'd call At the masquerade ball, He said, "I'll go just as ...
— The Jingle Book • Carolyn Wells
... black, "and the recurrence to image-worship, where image-worship has been abolished. Do you know that Moses is considered by the church as no better than a heretic, and though, for particular reasons, it has been obliged to adopt his writings, the adoption was merely a sham one, as it never paid the slightest attention to them? No, no, the church was never led by Moses, nor by one mightier than he, whose doctrine it has equally nullified—I allude to Krishna in his second avatar; the church, it is true, governs in his name, but not unfrequently ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... in hospital. God's blessing is on them; but do you never forget that your colours are a sign to you that Christ's blessing is on you. If they do not mean that to you, what was the use of blessing them with prayer? It must have been a lie and a sham. But it is no lie, brave men, and no sham; it is a glorious truth, of which those noble rags, inscribed with noble names of victory, should remind you every day and every hour, that he who fights for Queen and country in a just cause, ...
— True Words for Brave Men • Charles Kingsley
... voice sounded preternaturally sly in the absolute darkness, but even through that impenetrable veil I knew it for a sham. I had laid hold of the hand-rail. It shook violently in my hand; he also was holding it where he stood. And these suppressed tremors, or rather their detection in this way, struck a strange chill to my heart, just as I was beginning to pluck ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... probable that the females are excited, either before or after the conflict, by certain males, and thus unconsciously prefer them. In the case of Tetrao umbellus, a good observer (23. 'Land and Water,' July 25, 1868, p. 14.) goes so far as to believe that the battles of the male "are all a sham, performed to show themselves to the greatest advantage before the admiring females who assemble around; for I have never been able to find a maimed hero, and seldom more than a broken feather." I shall have to recur to this subject, but I may here add that with the Tetrao cupido of the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... bending over her, endeavoring to restore her to consciousness. In the background were some flying figures, who were hastening up to separate the combatants. The sketch was one of real life, denuded of any sham element of romance, and this was the one that M. de Breulh had chosen. The two men discussed the size of the picture, and not a ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... not sensible like men, you know. And always the footlights made a halo about him; and when you saw him as Castalio or Romeo, all beauty and love and vigor and nobility, how was a woman to understand his splendor was a sham, taken off with his wig, removed with his pinchbeck jewelry, and as false? No, they thought it native, poor wretches. Yet one of them at least, my Lord—a young girl—found out her error before it was too late. The man was a villain ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... his trusted servants, cried, "Woe is me! who am left as a traveller amongst strangers, and who have no longer relatives to lend me support in the day of adversity!" Thus do the most shameless take pleasure in exhibiting sham sorrow after crimes they ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume I. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... in Asia is the being obliged, more or less, to make your way by bullying. It is true that your own lips are not soiled by the utterance of all the mean words that are spoken for you, and that you don’t even know of the sham threats, and the false promises, and the vainglorious boasts, put forth by your dragoman; but now and then there happens some incident of the sort which I have just been mentioning, which forces you to believe, or suspect, that your dragoman is habitually fighting your battles for ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... you know—she is simply an exaggerated incarnation of the most unsatisfactory sides of feminine nature. All women have something of her in them, but the less of her they have the more charming you'll find them. In the sham, tawdry world of the footlights she feels something akin to her whole being. It calls to such a woman almost from her very cradle, and fly to it she must. It is true that, in her case, this stage-infatuation was a real misfortune, for in some other ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... steel— "Not that; anything but that. No kingdom of Heaven at all for us, if the kingdom of Heaven is like that. No heroes at all for us, if their heroism is to consist in their being not-men. Better no society at all, but only a competitive wild-beast's den, than a sham society. Better no faith, no hope, no love, no God, than shams thereof." I take my stand on fact and nature; you may call them idols and phantoms; I say they need be so no longer to any man, since Bacon has taught us to discover the Eternal Laws under the outward phenomena. ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... I? If I seemed to be having a good time, I should be compelled to go through it again. No, society is organized for people under twenty-five. They really enjoy it. For the rest of the world it is a sham." ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... us—they will learn not to respect God. If they see that we do not respect truth and honesty, they will not respect truth and honesty; and he who does not respect them, does not respect God. They will learn to look on religion as a sham. If we are inconsistent, they ...
— Town and Country Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... this dilemma: if he wears actual spectacles, he cannot see through them; if he wears sham spectacles of plain glass, his disguise will probably be detected. There is only one way out of the difficulty, and that not a very satisfactory one; but Mr. Weiss seems to have adopted it in lieu of a better. It is that of using ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... Moslem from the non-Moslem exactly as he divides the man from the camel. But even then he recognises the equality of men in the sense of the equality of Moslems. He does not, for instance, complicate his conscience with any sham science about races. In this he has something like an intellectual advantage over the Jew, who is generally so much his intellectual superior; and even in some ways his spiritual superior. The Jew ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... an irresolute expression; he saw he was jammed up in the wind, so at a venture he determined to sham deafness. ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... fiber top was of a light yellowish color, which looked bright in the moonlight. This had been removed and stored in the wagon, so that when the wagon was driven away the sham arrangement did not disclose the ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Tribesmen • Roger Finlay
... too, was not in a condition for war. Von Tschirscky doubted that Russia, who had no right to assume a protectorate over Serbia, would assert it by action; Germany knew what she was about in backing up Austria-Hungary; the Serbian concessions were all a sham, as proved by the Government previously ordering mobilization and preparing to ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... the family altar at your house a bridge from earth to heaven, or is it a sham, and a helper to those who say, ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... to audience.) At this juncture I may mention That this erudition sham Is but classical pretension, The result of steady "cram.": Periphrastic methods spurning, To this audience discerning I admit this show of learning Is the fruit of ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... to this heresy that God is magic, is the heresy that calls him Providence, that declares the apparent adequacy of cause and effect to be a sham, and that all the time, incalculably, he is pulling about the order of events ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... collections of discords duly prepared and resolved or retarded or anticipated in the manner of the great composers, think they can learn the art of Palestrina from Cherubim's treatise. All this academic art is far worse than the trade in sham antique furniture; for the man who sells me an oaken chest which he swears was made in the XIII century, though as a matter of fact he made it himself only yesterday, at least does not pretend that there are any modern ideas in it, whereas your academic copier of fossils offers ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... chief then? I don't ask you to make the old woman civil, but I think you might keep her from insulting your friends! I begin to think your chiefdom a sham!" ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... instability. Col. Joseph MOBUTU seized power and declared himself president in a November 1965 coup. He subsequently changed his name - to MOBUTU Sese Seko - as well as that of the country - to Zaire. MOBUTU retained his position for 32 years through several subsequent sham elections, as well as through the use of brutal force. Ethnic strife and civil war, touched off by a massive inflow of refugees in 1994 from fighting in Rwanda and Burundi, led in May 1997 to the toppling of the MOBUTU regime ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... the house; and I soon became as expert as any of them. The ends of our lances were not only headless, but covered with a soft pad, so that we could charge at each other without much risk of serious injury; and one day, in a sham fight, I unhorsed all my opponents in succession. As I rode up to where the ladies—who had come out to witness our sports—were standing, they greeted me with loud applause, and Donna Isabella especially showed her satisfaction by the bright ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... the cheap, and foresaw fortune in the facture of the sham. Then sprang into existence the tawdry, the common, the gewgaw, and what was born of the million went back to them and charmed them, for it was after their own heart.... And Birmingham and Manchester arose in their might—and Art was relegated to ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... a fair-weather show. If it ever happen that they fall, as it generally does, they will at once understand how friendless they are. So they say Tarquin observed in his exile that he never knew which of his friends were real and which sham, until he had ceased to be able to repay either. Though what surprises me is that a man of his proud and overbearing character should have a friend at all. And as it was his character that prevented his having genuine friends, so it often happens in the case of ...
— Treatises on Friendship and Old Age • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... settlement on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashions as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church, perchance, or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham fight with the Indians, or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... cheerfully, when the pupil had mastered the vague outlines of his business, "you see what can be done by kindness. I haven't hit you once, and you know enough already not to blow her up if only you're careful. Don't you even sham stupid again; and, see here, don't you grit your teeth at me when you think I'm not looking, or I'll beat you into butcher's meat when I've hammered these rebels, and have a bit of spare time. You want to learn a lot of manners yet, Mr. Commandant Balliot, and where I come from we teach these to ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... Macgregor with a grim smile; "then, perhaps, since you are so good as to go along with us, you'll make for the head of that valley, and when you come to the Wild-Cat Pass I've spoken of, you'll wait there till the rest of us, who are to sham going back to the fort, come up with ye; then we'll go through the pass together, and polish off ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... each one saw His own reflection and recoiled in awe; Saw himself there, a bright light shining through him, Not as he thought himself, but as men knew him. Before this sudden and revealing sense Each rag of sham, each tatter of pretence Withered and vanished, as dissolved in air, And left the shuddering human creature bare. But when they turned and looked upon a friend They saw a sight that all but made amend: For they beheld him as a radiant spirit Indued with virtue ...
— The Vagabond and Other Poems from Punch • R. C. Lehmann
... grow anxious. He visited quite a number of ships and yachts in the harbour, and at each refusal the price of his treasure came down, until he was eager to sell it for a few francs. But still no one would have it. Everyone took it for granted that the pearl was a sham, and most of the persons whom he accosted assumed that it had been stolen. The position was getting desperate. Evening was approaching—the time of the dreaded dog-watches—and still the pearl was in his possession. Gladly would he now have given it away for nothing, but he dared not try, ...
— John Thorndyke's Cases • R. Austin Freeman
... sincerity. Priest and public man as he was, there was not a line of hypocrisy or cant in his whole being. A sham was to him intolerable, the abomination of desolation standing where it ought not. Reckless of consequences, of danger, of his popularity, and of his life, he blurted out the whole truth, as he saw it, "despite all cardinals, popes, kings and emperors, together with all devils and hell." ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... 't is their nature to," as I remarked just now. Women are compounds of plain-sewing and make-believe, daughters of Sham and of Hem. I consider dress an epidemic disease,—a moral cholera that originates in the worst quarters of Paris. Every ship that comes from those regions is infected with French trollopism, and should ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... they deserved to be, the idols of the nation. They were compelled to fly because, as Dr. Anderson, a Protestant minister, says, "artful Cecil had employed one St. Lawrence to entrap the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell, the Lord of Devlin, and other Irish chiefs, into a sham plot which ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... Anthony upon her fiftieth birthday a number of years ago, and the news was in all the papers. That dress is going into history with Commissioner Storrs, Judge Selden and the illustrious rest. It has always been worn by a lady—a genuine lady—no pretense nor sham—but good Quaker metal. She is no "sour old maid," our Miss Anthony, nor are the young men shy of her when she can find time to accept an invitation out; genial, cheery, warm-hearted, overflowing with stories and reminiscences, utterly fearless and regardless of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... know," frankly answered the professor. "I suppose it was because no one saw us; or they may have supposed we were bringing some supplies to one of the officers. Then, there was a sham battle going on not far away at the time, and that may have taken the attention of the sentries. Anyhow, I got through the lines, and, opening the box, let Ticula out to roam about and catch ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... that will do!" Chia Lien rejoined laughing, "none of these sham attentions for me! So long as you don't pry into my doings it will be enough; and will I go so far as to bear you ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... and easy quiet manner he certainly contrasted very favourably with his friend. Merton was loud and incessant in his talk, and walked about and gesticulated, and spoke with an unnecessary emphasis, a sham earnestness, which more than once called an anxious look to his wife's ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... I could, without a cent in my pocket or a word of Spanish in my tongue, or anything but white hands and expensive habits to get my bread with. And the natural result was that I got a dip into the real hell to cure me of imagining sham ones. A pretty thorough dip, too—it was just five years before the Duprez expedition came along ...
— The Gadfly • E. L. Voynich
... "That was all a sham. Perhaps I have indulged her too much, and not begun early enough to subdue her violent temper. She is very wilful, ...
— Seek and Find - or The Adventures of a Smart Boy • Oliver Optic
... A tear rose to her eye. She bravely dried it with a finger of a white cotton glove, and produced her purse, an imitation crocodile-leather and sham-silver affair, bought in Kentish Town, where you may walk through odorous groves of dried haddocks that are really whiting, and Yarmouth bloaters that never were at Yarmouth, and purchase whole Rambler roses, the latest Paris style, for threepence, and try on feather-boas ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... whose chief attraction had, for me, consisted not so much in her surpassing loveliness of person, though doubtless that had had its effect upon me, as in that angelic purity and fascinating simplicity and truthfulness of character which I now discovered to be a mere worthless sham. It was evident enough that Merlani had been her lover—most probably her accepted lover—when I appeared upon the scene; and that, dazzled by my appearance of superior wealth, she had in the most heartless and cruel manner thrown him overboard; and, with a cunning and artfulness which ...
— The Rover's Secret - A Tale of the Pirate Cays and Lagoons of Cuba • Harry Collingwood
... by his own fire. His intelligence had never been much to boast of, but there were not many difficulties in the problem that life had set him. He hated with a logic that was quite convincing. The strong community had passed a sham law, which was not even liable for the obligations that it admitted that it had with regard to him. He had done with it now and belonged to ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... stands for all that is bad in country life. In London he would keep his place. He would belong to a brainless club, and his wife would give brainless dinner parties. But down here he acts the little god with his gentility, and his patronage, and his sham aesthetics, and every one—even ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... the pope's legate, demanded that an image should be then set up in the midst of the assembly, and honored by all, which was done; and that the books written against holy images night be condemned and burned, which the council also ratified. In the sixth session the sham council of the Iconoclasts under Copronymus was condemned and refuted as to every article: as first, that it falsely styled itself a general council; for it was not received but anathematized by the other bishops of the church. Secondly, because ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... he might have been willing to write home from Padua or Louvain, in order to coax another remittance from his Irish friends—he would afterwards, in the presence of such men as Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds, wear sham honours. It is much more probable that, on his finding those supplies from Ireland running ominously short, the philosophic vagabond determined to prove to his correspondents that he was really at work somewhere, instead of merely idling away his time, begging or borrowing the wherewithal ...
— Goldsmith - English Men of Letters Series • William Black
... the above sum, it was furthermore agreed that Louis should pay Charles a pension of 200,000 pounds a year from the date when the latter should openly avow himself a Roman Catholic. Later (1671), Charles made a sham treaty with Louis XIV in which the article about his avowing himself a Catholic was omitted in ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... depression of mind.' Could you have kept quite well had you been a Campbell with John Gordon for a husband? Think of having to nurse your humbug of a husband through a shammed illness. Think of having to take a hand in sending in a sham doctor's certificate because your husband was too much of a time-server to go to Edinburgh to give his vote for a persecuted church. Think of having to wear the title and decoration your husband had purchased for you at the cost of his truth and honour and manhood. Lady Kenmure needed Samuel ...
— Samuel Rutherford - and some of his correspondents • Alexander Whyte
... sham All talk and no cider Condition my room is always in when you are not around Deprived of the soothing consolation of swearing Frankness is a jewel; only the young can afford it Genius defies the ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Mark Twain • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)
... took the miller's view, counting the loss of one stout young Englishman to his country of far greater importance than the escapades of dozens of girls, for which simple creatures he had no compassion: he held the expression of it a sham. He had grown coxcombical. Without talking of his conquests, he talked largely of the ladies who were possibly in the situation of victims to his grace of person, though he did not do so with any ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with a clean slate, and make clean work of it. Let there be no hesitation. It would be a cowardly deference to a defeated and treacherous President, if any account were made of the illegitimate, one-sided, sham governments hurried into existence for a malign purpose in the absence of Congress. These pretended governments, which were never submitted to the people, and from participation in which four millions of the loyal people were excluded ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... better withdraw that plea? You know it's a sham and generally that's another name for a lie. Don't let it go on record. The cursed thing may come staring us in the face long after this ...
— A Man for the Ages - A Story of the Builders of Democracy • Irving Bacheller
... contempt for my husband's modern notions. How absurd to keep the family ship, laden with all the weight of its time-honoured glory, sailing under the colours of his slip of a girl-wife alone! Often have I felt the lash of scorn. "A thief who had stolen a husband's love!" "A sham hidden in the shamelessness of her new-fangled finery!" The many-coloured garments of modern fashion with which my husband loved to adorn me roused jealous wrath. "Is not she ashamed to make a show-window of herself—and with her ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... in the least to tell her so, and the way you leave her in the morning is going to settle her happiness for the day, though she may be too proud to let you know that it makes any difference. Women are quick to detect a sham, and they don't want you to say anything that you don't feel, but you are pretty sure to feel tenderly toward her sometimes, careless though you may be, and then is the time to tell her so. You don't want to wait until she is dead, and then buy a lily to put on her coffin. You'd ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... or a bore, a silly little idiot or a fisher of men, a social sham who prattled of duchesses or a strenuous feminine politician who babbled of votes; a Christian Scientist bent on converting, an adventuress without adventures (the worst kind), a mind-healer or a body-snatcher, a hockey-player or even a lady novelist, it would have been exactly the same; ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... which has not escaped the malice of Porphyry, supposes some error and passion in one or both of the apostles. By Chrysostom, Jerome, and Erasmus, it is represented as a sham quarrel a pious fraud, for the benefit of the Gentiles and the correction of the Jews, (Middleton's Works, vol. ii. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... of those who went with the rajah to the river side. Jago Mohun Dobee pressed his legs under the water, and kept them so; and about 10 p.m. his soul quitted the body. When he died, his knees were under water, but the rest of his body above." Evidence of Radha Sircar and Sham Chum Baboo, before the Mofussil Court of Hoogly, September 1838, in the enquiry on the impostor Kistololl, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... yet—only listen to me. I am so tired of living on husks, I seem to be nothing but a husk myself, brainless, soulless, and empty. I am so tired of sham and pretence, of keeping up appearances. I hate appearances. They are all false, unreal, loathsome. Yes, I am a well-trained puppet; I smile and chatter, dance and sing, am haughtily self-satisfied; ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... was put through a number of movements, which they executed very creditably. Then they were divided into two equal parts, which were marched to the opposite extremities of the plateau, when they faced about, and, charging down upon each other, engaged in a very realistic sham fight, lasting for the best part of an hour, and resulting in quite a number of casualties, several of the men being unhorsed and sustaining more or less serious injuries; after which the regiment re-formed, ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... too overwhelming—too much like a bomb. I think you must be one of the supermen one reads about. You would want your own way and nothing but your own way. Now, Freddie will roll through hoops and sham dead, and we shall be the happiest pair in the world. I am much too placid and mild to make you happy. You want somebody who would stand up ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... their crested helmets, their richly gilt armour, and the heraldic banners, which were attached to the back of the cuirass and floated about two feet over their heads. As soon as the horsemen were stationed the exciting part of the sham-fight began, by the lines being wheeled backwards and forwards in wings from the centre, and into zigzag formations from central points, with a slow 'stamp-and-go' march, the spears being flourished with each motion and pointed high ...
— Sketches of Japanese Manners and Customs • J. M. W. Silver
... of date. Johnson's division between the shams and the realities deserves all respect in both cases, but in both cases he puts many things on the wrong side of the dividing line. His hearty contempt for sham pastorals and sham love-poetry will be probably shared by modern readers. 'Who will hear of sheep and goats and myrtle bowers and purling rivulets through five acts? Such scenes please barbarians in the dawn of literature, and children in the dawn of life, but will be for the most part thrown ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... the whole of his mature career he has addressed the nobler soul of humanity and given to the people what they ought to have; and the actor who is really able to do that naturally conquers everything. It is not a matter of artifice and simulation; it is a matter of being genuine and not a sham. ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... myself into a rigorous sort of philosophic desperation which made me as cool as a cucumber. To seem to empty the contents of the wallet into my lap was my next object, and this I succeeded in, without his suspecting that my movement was a sham only. The purse thus made up, I emphatically told him was all I had—this was the truth—and then came the crisis. His trick was to be employed now or never. It was employed, but he had become so nervous, that I caught a sufficient glimpse of his proceedings. I saw the slight o'hand ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... remain friends, but you shall not continually tarnish my poetry with your accursed science! I thank my Creator that He made me ignorant enough to admire the beauties of nature. You are continually peeping behind the scenes, and pointing out the grease paints, the lime-lights and the sham effects. Let me enjoy the beauty of the tableau, no matter how it is produced. I would give all of your pat knowledge for that feeling of profound awe which rises in the untutored breast at beholding the ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... the needy junior is compelled, for the sake of appearances, to furnish his shelves with law books, and cover his table with counterfeit briefs. Under the Stuarts, he placed a bowl of spurious money amongst the sham papers that lay upon ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... who have enjoyed the privilege of his intimate acquaintance, the man himself is more than the author. His genial nature, entire freedom from jealousy or envy, quick tenderness, large charity, hatred of sham, pretence, and unreality, and his reverent sense of the eternal and permanent have secured for him something more and dearer than literary renown,—the love of all who know him. I might say much more: I could not say less. May his life be long ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... it in plain words, I do dare to say it, and furthermore, it is true, and you know it. Your plea that you must remain at home is all a sham. When the Yankees came this way you were all ready to run for your life at the first sign of real danger. You never thought of your ...
— Young Captain Jack - The Son of a Soldier • Horatio Alger and Arthur M. Winfield
... with a man but a nation. Perceiving that the friendship of the Russian Government was necessary to many of his mining schemes in the East, he had changed his name as lightly as another would have changed his coat, had cast the garments of a sham patriotism and emerged an enemy to all that he had hitherto befriended, a foe to ...
— Aladdin of London - or Lodestar • Sir Max Pemberton
... is discouraging to the mother to find the eiderdown coverlets becoming soiled where the children rub their hands over them. This can be avoided by making a tiny sham of swiss or other similar material and basting it across the top of the coverlet. It can be pinned into place at the corners with tiny baby pins or caught with a few stitches. These shams edged with narrow lace add a really attractive touch to the coverlet, and they can ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... fifteenth century, and think themselves Liberal when they are defending the ideas of Henry VII, and gentlemanly when they are opposing to them the ideas of Richard III. Thus the educated man is a greater nuisance than the uneducated one: indeed it is the inefficiency and sham of the educational side of our schools (to which, except under compulsion, children would not be sent by their parents at all if they did not act as prisons in which the immature are kept from worrying the mature) that save us from being dashed on the rocks of false doctrine ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... and newspapers bulged with heated argument; newsboys cried extras on the street, and bands of students paraded the boulevards singing songs in praise of Mrs. Mackay and in dishonor of Meissonier, "the pretender." The assertion was made again and again that Meissonier had fed sham art upon the public, and by means of preposterous prices and noisy puffing had hypnotized a world. They called him the artist of the Infinitely Little, King of Lilliput, and challenged any one to show where he had thrown heart and high emotion into his work. Studies of coachmen, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... one capable of distinguishing the difference, the evidence of mind and taste, instead of mere money, is seen on every side. Simplicity and beauty are united as far as possible. Everything is the best of its kind and devoid of veneer and sham. There is no lavish and vulgar profusion, and there is a harmony of color and decoration that makes every room a picture in itself. Moreover, the house does not grow suddenly shabby after you leave those parts which are seen ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful. In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the State, pretension is nothing and ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... of the noun of the same spelling, which is derived from it; for instance, we frequently read in the newspapers that the Whigs or Democrats have been sold, i.e. defeated in an election, or cheated in some political affair. The phrase to sell a bargain, which Bailey defines "to put a sham upon one," is now scarcely ever heard. It was once a favorite expression with certain ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... you but a thief? Lastly, if you fill an office, or produce an article, which, in your heart of hearts, you think a delusion and a fraud upon mankind, and still draw your salary and go through the sham manoeuvres of this office, or still book your profits and keep on flooding the world with these injurious goods?—though you were old, and bald, and the first at church, and a baronet, what are you but a thief? These may seem hard words and mere curiosities ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with our spiritual needs. And for several years I wrought at Christian symbolism, trying to build up for my soul a home of poetical faith so to speak. But in the end this could not satisfy me; I knew that I was cherishing a sham, a pretty make-believe after the manner of children. Better the blindness of true religion than this illusion of the imagination. And I was now ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... the Portrait of a Slav Prince at the Hermitage, where a man in the alembic of Rembrandt's imagination has become a type. Also in The Reconciliation of David and Absalom at the Hermitage, where behind the sham trappings of the figures shine the eternal ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... church in a large town ten miles from here to-day with Sergeant Hodge. There were the usual tinsel things and red baize and sham flowers. Sergeant Hodge much impressed. He said after we emerged: "You know, sir, it's very fine indeed. It puts me in mind of a bazaar." This was in all good faith, and was intended as a great compliment to the church! ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... bewitched and bamboozled the young lady's sense; Others thought, with more reason, the secret to lie In a magical wash or indelible dye; While Society, with its censorious eye And judgment impartial, stood ready to damn What wasn't improper as being a sham. ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte
... The value of work, of constant occupation, to sustain and divert the mind, was speedily learned. Gradually she took the helm of outdoor matters from her uncle's nerveless hands. She had a good deal of a battle in respect to Chunk. It was a sham one on the part of Zany, as the girl well knew, for Chunk's "tootin'" was missed terribly. Mr. and Mrs. Baron at first refused point-blank to hear of ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... was;—very 'impossible,' for it is as yet a No-thing! The Unseen Powers had need to watch over such a man; he works in and for the Unseen. Alas, if he look to the Seen Powers only, he may as well quit the business; his No-thing will never rightly issue as a Thing, but as a Deceptivity, a Sham-thing,—which it had better ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... interventions, is, of course, Thackeray. But I think the trouble with Thackeray is not that he makes first-personal interventions, but that he does so with a curious touch of dishonesty. I agree with the late Mrs. Craigie that there was something profoundly vulgar about Thackeray. It was a sham thoughtful, sham man-of-the-world pose he assumed; it is an aggressive, conscious, challenging person astride before a fire, and a little distended by dinner and a sense of social and literary precedences, ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... the ladies were getting up. So Miss Van Siever also got up, and left Mr Conway Dalrymple to consider whether he could say or could think of himself that he was not a sham in anything. As regarded Miss Clara Van Siever, he began to think that he could not object to paint her portrait, even though there might be no sugar-plum. He would certainly do it as Jael; and he would, if he dared, insert dimly in the background some idea of the face of the mother, ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... the liberty of the individual citizen, to make it a reality instead of a sham, by universal education and by an ever-rising standard of humane conditions both in the ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... pickle! The world is wondrous fickle; But lately it would stickle For Progress by Exam. And now, in Trade and Learning, Against me they seem turning, Deliberately discerning In me a noxious sham! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, May 30, 1891 • Various
... poor Desdemona, most sweetly. My dear Felis Leo, I do feel that we owe A debt to the urban proprieties. Don't shame yourself, Ursa, but quite vice versa, You know how impressive caste's quiet is! But, JAMRACH! O JAMRACH! Woe's stretched on no sham rack Of metre that mourns you sincerely; E'en that hard nut o' natur, the great Alligator, Has eyes that look red, and blink queerly. Mere "crocodile's tears," some may snigger; but jeers Must disgust at a moment so doleful. For JAMRACH the brave, who has gone to his grave, All our sorrow's sincere ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... and believed—as many persons of robust constitution are too apt to do when brought face to face with nervous patients—that he might shake off the whole of his maladies at any time by a resolute effort, so that his sympathy was all a sham, though, perhaps, one may pardon it, considering the end in view, which was that of persuading the old gentleman to entrust the young ladies to his nephew's care for that evening in the Long Walk; ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... you again?" he said. "How absurd! Are you going to cheat the poor creatures you attend with sham medicines?" ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... straits, though to the world's eye he was a man of wealth. A gambler, with no inexpensive tastes, he had been always in need of money. The rights in his patent he had mortgaged long ago. He was not an idler; he was no sham foisted as a great man on an ignorant public. He had really some touch of genius, and he cultivated it assiduously. But the harder he worked, the greater was his need of gaiety and extravagance. Gifted with good looks and a charm of manner, he was popular ...
— At the Villa Rose • A. E. W. Mason
... in a sou'-wester, Sunday came in upon Sunday, roaring on his flat, defenceless shore, Sunday behind Sunday rose towering, in awful perspective, away to the verge of an infinite horizon—Sunday after Sunday of dishonesty and sham—yes, hypocrisy, far worse than any idolatry. To begin now, and in such circumstances, to study the evidences of Christianity, were about as reasonable as to send a man, whose children were crying for their dinner, off to China to make ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... of Evora, and a little lower down the hill, stands the Graca or church of the canons of St. Augustine. Begun during the reign of Dom Joao III., the nave and chancel, in which there is a fine tomb, have many details which recall the Conceicao at Thomar, such as windows set in sham perspective. But they were long in building, and the now broken down barrel vault and the curious porch were not added till the reign of Dom Sebastiao, while the monastic buildings were finished about ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... afterwards borrowed in better known work), who seems to have been excluded from the knowledge of anything particularly Celestial.[236] But they are rather smartly told. On the other hand, Florine ou la Belle Italienne, which is included in the same volume with the sham Chinoiseries, is one of the worst instances of the confusion of kinds noted above. It honestly prepares one for what is coming by a reference in the Preface to Fenelon; but a list of dramatis (or fabulae) personae, which follows, would have ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... better mesters nah, an they'n better sooat a wark anole. They dooant mezher em we a stick, as oud Natta Hall did. But for all that, we'd none a yer wirligig polishin; nor Tom Dockin scales, wit bousters comin off; nor yer sham stag, nor sham revvits, an sich loik. T' noives wor ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat |
